Entities (e.g., businesses or individuals) that want to offer new services often have to invest significant amounts of resources and time in order develop and test the infrastructure (e.g., servers, networks, security systems and protocols, etc.) necessary to deploy those services. The development and testing process increases the operating costs for the entities, and delay the deployment of the service. Also, the newly developed infrastructure (e.g., systems, networks, etc.) may also require integration with, or modification of existing infrastructure (e.g., existing networks, servers, point of sale (POS) terminals, etc.), further complicating and delaying the deployment of the service, and increasing the complexity of the day-to-day operations of the entity. This complicated process often prohibits or discourages many entities from investing the time and resources required to deploy new services, which in turn causes patrons of those entities to seek those services elsewhere, or causes reduced productivity for employees of those entities.
A further challenge faced by many entities when deploying new services is government regulations, which may place restrictions on how the services are implemented or provided, and often specify various requirements for auditing the provisioning of the services to users (e.g., for purposes of proving up compliance with the relevant regulations). In such instances, an entity desiring to deploy a new service that is regulated by the government must not only invest in the infrastructure necessary to provide the service, but may also have to invest in personnel that have expertise in understanding the relevant governmental regulations, such as for auditing and regulatory compliance purposes.
As an alternative to developing the systems and regulatory compliance infrastructure, an entity may seek to become a franchisee of another entity that already offers those same services. While this may reduce or eliminate one or more of the problems described above (e.g., because the franchisor may already have the necessary infrastructure developed, and may provide regulatory compliance assistance to its franchisees), this route often proves unsatisfactory to many entities. For example, as a franchisee, an entity is often limited with respect to control over how those services are provided. Additionally, the franchisees may have less creative freedom to customize the services they seek to provide to suit their users.